All’s well that ends well

In a cre­ative domain, end may hold more mean­ing than many philoso­phers might want to attribute it. An art not prop­erly put to com­ple­tion is as unfor­tu­nate as the one never ini­ti­ated. Its like putting a rest­less soul to sleep. An effec­tive end­ing is the ulti­mate sig­na­ture of an artist. The thought came to my mind when I saw For­rest Gump yes­ter­day. The feather that floated off in the air at the cli­max of the movie, just like how it started, com­pleted it so beau­ti­fully and tied the whole expe­ri­ence together. Cli­max of a book or a movie is the most sen­si­tive and yet, impact­ing point and only the wise can exploit it cor­rectly. That is what makes Shaw­shank Redemp­tion or Casablanca an all-time favorite to me. That is what makes O’ Henry so spe­cial. And, its not just a twist in the tale at the end that I am talk­ing about. It may be as sim­plis­tic as Jab We Met, LOTR, The Note­book, HDDCS or Dil Chahta Hai. Or, it may be as spec­u­la­tive as Gone With The Wind, Aandhi (remem­ber that ‘tere bina zindagi se koi shikva nahi’) or Avi­a­tor. A sat­is­fy­ing end is the hall­mark of an artist who has a good grasp on her sub­ject. Dasht–e–tan­hai by Faiz would prob­a­bly be an ordi­nary poetry with­out the excep­tional ‘yun gumaan hota hai..’ end­ing verse. All of Ghalib’s ashaar would qual­ify here too. Same with Rahman’s ‘Khwaja’ sufi num­ber from Jod­haa–Akbar and ‘Jaage hain’ in Guru, where he takes the audi­ence to a totally dif­fer­ent level towards the end­ing of song. For that mat­ter, watch Kie?lowski’s Trzy kolory: Bialy ( White from the French tri­color tril­ogy) for I have no jus­ti­fy­ing adjectives.

And its not an easy task either. There are plen­i­tude of badly exe­cuted exam­ples — any(ok, most) Sub­hash Ghai movie, POTC III, Spi­der­man III, Jodha Akbar and many more. Its not only about a bad or spec­tac­u­lar ‘end’ in the end but for me, I always have higher expec­ta­tions for a crisp con­clu­sion. Right now, I am stuck in a paint­ing which I am hav­ing a tough time fin­ish­ing. Leave apart sto­ries, movies or poems; a pic­ture not com­pleted well is totally mean­ing­less because that is the only thing finally vis­i­ble to the eye.

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